This invention relates generally to social networking, and in particular to structured information about nodes on a social networking system.
In recent years, social networking systems have made it easier for users to share their interests and preferences in real-world concepts, such as their favorite movies, musicians, celebrities, soft drinks, hobbies, sports teams, and activities. Users may use multiple social networking systems to identify their favorite restaurants, meals, and entertainment venues, for example. A user may need to navigate several different domains external to a particular social networking system to research a particular restaurant, meal, entertainment venue, movie, musician, and the like. The information available about a concept, such as a restaurant and meals served by the restaurant, may be supplied by other people unconnected to the user. Information supplied by other users connected to the user on a social networking system may not be highlighted on the various domains external to the social networking system.
Users of social networking systems have shared their interests and engaged with other users of the social networking systems by expressing their interests in these concepts on web pages on different domains external to the social networking system. The amount of information gathered from users is staggering—information describing interests in sports, music, movies, food, restaurants, and the like. Social networking systems have recorded this information to personalize the user experience, but social networking systems have lacked tools to enable users to effectively and efficiently identify shared interests in sports, music, movies, food, restaurants and the like in real-time. For example, a user of a social networking system in search of the top restaurants nearby that serve “dry-fried chicken wings” may search for those keywords on several external systems, relying on strangers' reviews, even if several friends of the user have recommended a particular restaurant. If that user finds a new restaurant that recently opened that serves amazing chicken wings, that user cannot effectively share that recommendation to other users on the social networking system.
Specifically, social networking systems have not provided tools to enable users to provide structured information about concepts and receive aggregated information about shared interests with other connected users. Enabling users to provide structured information about concepts on a social networking system provides a better understanding of the concepts on the social networking system. As more information is provided on the social networking system, users become more engaged because of the enhanced user experience. However, existing systems have not provided efficient mechanisms of receiving, aggregating, and sharing this valuable structured information.